[MPlayer-users] Strange results with mf://\*.png (more data)

[Mario Valle]

Some more data on the problem (see below).

1) I'm using 1.0pre2 installed from rpm (from the official page) on Linux RH 7.2
2) Now the command line I'm using is:
    mencoder -ovc lavc -lavcopts vcodec=mpeg4:$opt -mf type=png:w=512:h=512:fps=25 -nosound -o output.avi mf://\*.png
3) The problem is not affected by the dimensions of the image
4) The problem seems related only to the PNG format. If I use JPEG the problem goes away
5) Seems that ImageMagick and mencoder do not love each other:
	If I convert to TGA, here is the message from mencoder:
		Unsupported TGA type! depth=0fps Trem:   0min   0mb  A-V:0.000 [0:0]
	Else, if I convert to SGI:
		Bad magic number in image.  0fps Trem:   0min   0mb  A-V:0.000 [0:0]

Sure, you will ask: "why don't you use JPEG? It seem to work".
Well, I don't want to loose quality in my frames using unneeded JPEG compression. Also the
frames are chemistry ball and sticks, not well suited to JPEG compression.

Any suggestion?
Thanks a lot!
			mario


------------- Here the original problem ----------------
I'm trying to create movies from a bunch of PNG frames.
Sometimes (with alarming frequency I must add...) also a simple MPNG movie
has wrong colors and is squeezed to the left leaving a black band on the right side.
The squeezing factor seems something like 3/4.

The command used to create the movie is:

mencoder -ovc copy -nosound -o tmp.avi mf://\*.png

and my ~/.mplayer/mencoder file contains only:

mf=type=png

The same behavior happens during the real MPEG4 compression. Also once happened that a movie returned
to normal after a color change in the scene (from almost b&w to color).

If you want to reproduce the problem, a set of 10 frames can be found in:
http://www.cscs.ch/~mvalle/mencoder_bug.tar.gz

Thanks a lot for your help!
                     mario

-- 
Ing. Mario Valle
Data Mining and Visualization Group         | http://www.cscs.ch/~mvalle
CSCS, Swiss Center for Scientific Computing | Tel:  +41 (91) 610.82.60
Via Cantonale, 6928 Manno, Switzerland      | Fax:  +41 (91) 610.82.82